May I suggest Teoi and huacan (or Teoihuacan and Zhou is Zhou is renamed)
1. At least one or two more.I think we need to agree on a few things first:
Q1 - How many spies do we want?
We have 1 right now, it is 1 tile north of Tolosa. We can have another, for backup, it will take Production 2 turns. I vote YES.
Q2 - Should we build Colossus?
Since I support Astro beeline, I will have to say NO.
Q3 - Where should our existing settler go?
Desert island vs Clams/Sugar (probably the desert tile) area? Clams/Sugar seems sub-optimal, it is a long way from Paris but does not have the +2 trade routes, it will cost us too much IMO.
My vote is for desert island first.
Q4 - How many settlers should we be building in the near future and where to settle them?
I like Commerce for the next settler, as nothing else is super urgent. The Clams/Sugar spot if no more island spots have multiple resources.
Q5 - How many more workers do we need?
I think just 1, in Clams, to be built immediately.
City Build Compromises
Paris - build a forge first,
Production - spy, trireme, workboat/worker, barracks??
Clams - worker, forge
Production is obviously the wildcard in any build plan, it's just so tempting to get it to build what we want. Enough of the team have expressed the desire to build another spy I think, and if we do it, it should be first. Same for the trireme, which can go second due to the less time critical nature of it. Then a WB or worker as the situation requires. A barracks is an excellent filler, as we will definitely need it sooner or later, especially if Brennus DoW's us.
Worker Compromises
Maybe send workers 3 & 4 to the Gems immediately after finishing the mine
Beg
Assuming Brennus is happy with the trade, the shared resources and shared civics when we get Currency, we could/should do a beg. It depends on how much wealth he has, as the beg points take quite a while to accumulate, and we don't want to waste them.
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As for tech plan, my vote is still for not beelining Astro. We want OU ASAP to practically double our research which will far outweigh the commerce from TR's. I still propose a test game to take place but we will need someone who has the time to do it. I will actually have time later this week since my days off are Thursday and Friday ( and Sat is going to be a sick day
Well, I'm worried about barb galleys and uncomfortable with the suggestion to put a settler on our galley before exploring with it. I'd rather do as Chris suggested and explore a little more before coming home for the settler. But this delays settling the island.
true? you are paying Emp AI far too much respect!
I don't think we are going to agree on this one any time soon.
I'm not just about the TR's, Astro gives us so much more. Tech & Resource trades, our UB.... OK we only need Optics for tech trades, but Optics is Astro-lite.
You have Thursday & Friday off
I remember my friends and I were happy to get a 10am start on Fridays, as opposed to 8am every other day. But that is what you get for doing Engineering/I.T.
Enjoy your 'sickness'
Like seriously, a science building giving an artist slot? 
The resources however can be helpful, but do we REALLY need it a couple of turns earlier? Will the benefits outweigh the losses? (religion, bur, edu, caste) one of which is directly related to one of the victory conditions.
As for why I think Music is important, it's 8% of the culture of one our LC cities that we are speaking about here, practically for free; we just need to get there first!
I think we are not looking at the bigger picture here (or maybe I'm not) but what I see is that significant multiplier buildings and civics, a better lib target and a religion is being neglected on the basis of...a couple of commerce? You guys are all better players than me but I think that's one of the issues
We meet them early: We get some commerce from TR's and trade a tech or two. What will we get: CoL, CS, Paper...? We'll just reach our WFYABTA limit faster...If the AI are indeed backward, they'll have little trouble trading with each other since the limit doesn't apply to the underdogs.
I pay Emperor no respect at all, its my favourite level. I can win on Immortal OK, and sometimes Deity, but Emperor is great and almost unlosable considering how much attention we are giving this game. I don't think it'll happen at all
OK, I will stop banging on about it.
-Monarchy, we should be able to get from AI on this continent
Have a look at the last SG, that is about the hardest Emperor game you will ever see, and most teams won.
Don't worry about WFYABTA, that is a great problem to have. Think about it, what is wrong with mass trading to the point that they no longer want to trade. WFYABTA does decay as well, so the earlier you reach it, the better. It also does not count if the AI are pleased, which won't be happening soon, but should by the end game.
Also, I am not in the slightest worried about Culture stuff for now. We will get lots and lots of Culture from Sushi, as long as we build the multipliers, the culture will accumulate very quickly. Don't forget that a fastest Culture VC usually only has 3-4 religions and Cathedrals. Since we are not trying to win culture in 1400ad, we can build all 7.
What I hope to get if we beeline Astro:
- Monarchy
- HBR
- CoL
- Construction
- Feudalism
- Drama
- Philo
- Maybe Engineering
- I doubt CS, but you never know
What I hope to give:
- backfill them almost up to our tech level.
EDIT:
!
Anyway, it's not about winning on this difficulty level, it's about optimising our play so minimal turns are wasted. For example, do we need to research archery? Oh but it's one turn! But it's one turn that we could have spent researching FT! Oh I had another idea, since we were on the topic of GP earlier.
Nevermind that! A prophet has better uses! Even though I think we'll be outvoted, nice to not be alone They are very good players after all and could probably pull it off without too much difficulty!
In most SGOTMs (and xOTM) the winning teams start conquering a lot sooner than me/my team.and I have a feeling they did a chariot rush
Great Wall?
Re Prophet: Oh dear, FT is quite the expensive tech!
Re Other Teams: Are you sure they are fighting? City size adds to power rating so it could still be that alongside no other cities growing which is possible in that short turnset.
As for our situation in 29 turns, I think that is a bad example, because although your method does give a head start for the first 29 turns, my method will give us a lot more techs in the long term. Agreed that there is reliance on the AI to tech stuff for us but the techs I want to trade for are the ones that the AI tend to research themselves (Calendar, maybe Maths). And these are only two techs! By that time, we should have Brennus on a strong pleased or even friendly! +1 yop, +max8 for shared religion (we should get to at least 6 since 3 already), +4 fair trade (we are giving him an amazing deal with alpha) and +4 shared civics (hopefully get to +2 at least), we get -1 from base and I THINK -1/2 for being ahead. That is actually enough to get us to friendly!
Edit: Glad to see I'm not the only one to vote for Taoism
and I have a feeling they did a chariot rush
Edit again: Are you sure its a war? It doesn't seem probable bearing in mind that their power rating increased by 20 in 2 turns which is far too fast for even whipping out units! Plus chariot war=lots of losses which would mean their rating would have also dropped which it hasn't.
